A Comprehensive Guide to the Protest Tees of New York Fashion Week

From left to right: By Victor Virgile/Gamma-Rapho, Randy Brooke/WireImage, Slaven Vlasic, all from Getty Images.

A lot has happened between September 2016 and February 2017. A reality-TV bulldozer became president of the United States, sparking one of the largest protests in the country’s history. He instituted a travel ban against seven Muslim-majority nations that invited more wide-sweeping protests at the nation’s airports. He antagonized allies. Eighteen million stand to lose health-care coverage if he moves forward with his campaign promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act. People are scared, and yet the show must go on. Or shows.

We’re talking about New York Fashion Week, where, like creatives in other industries, designers were faced with the challenge of how to continue with business as usual under these circumstances. For many, the answer was a familiar one: T-shirts bearing political messages.

Take Prabal Gurung, who sent models down the runway in soft-knit tees that declared “The future is female,” “I am an immigrant,” “Our minds, our bodies, our power,” “Revolution has no borders,” “Stronger than fear,” “Nothing more, nothing less,” “Awake,” and more.

"In the good old days, fashion was an escape and a fantasy, and all of that is gone. The world we live in is so uncertain, people are really taking to action,” designer Gurung, who was raised in Nepal, told Vanity Fair this week. “I think what fashion has a responsibility to provide not an escape, but a reality. An optimistic reality.”

Gurung’s T-shirts were directly inspired by the Women’s March in New York, which he attended with hundreds of thousands of other people on January 21, less than a month before his runway show. “I feel like this country has given me an opportunity that no other country could do, and I owe it to this country,” he said, explaining the impetus for the shirts. “After creating this platform, that I speak up when I see there’s justice not being done, or when I feel like I can use my voice.”

Message tees are at least as old as 1948, when “Dew It for Dewey” decorated T-shirts for U.S. presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey. They have even grown in popularity on runways in recent seasons, but their messages have made a stark leap of late. Whereas last fall’s crop offered pointed, if vague (and possibly ironic) language—including “Futuresex” and “Canned Candies” at Peter Saville, “Hustler” and “Wench” at Hood by Air, “Thriving” at Baja East, and “Love” at Michael Kors—the post-Trump batch has left little to chance. (Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior tee from her September 2016 debut, which read, “We should all be feminists,” was something of an early harbinger of what was to come this season.) The tone has been one of inclusion and resistance—one that’s less cute, and more in line with protest tees of the 1970s and 1980s. Besides Gurung’s ad-hoc protest march, Christian Siriano sent a shirt that read “People are people” (a Depeche Mode song from 1984) down his runways. “We need leaders” and “Make America New York” proclaimed bomber jackets and red hats, respectively, at Public School. "We are all human beings” was the word at Creatures of Comfort.

So was this all just T-shirt activism, well, T-shirt activism? Possibly. But by and large, the designers who wore their statements on their sleeves (and chests and heads) tend have a track record of action. Gurung bristled at the general public’s tendency to look down at fashion as frivolous.

“We’re a multi-billion-dollar business,“ he said. “Not only is my position as a brand to make 90 percent of my clothes in New York, I’m an immigrant. I have a foundation back in Nepal that educates more than 200 children, from in-mates children to street-workers children. Yes, I make beautiful clothes and that brings me joy, but all these other things also bring me joy.”

His shirts pair well with action, or as he says, “I don't just do T-shirts. I don't just tweet. I do make an effort. I hope the next step is that people are actually getting their hands dirty and going to organizations that might need their help or the audience that they can share.”

Gurung says that the buyers of his T-shirts will eventually be able to choose between a couple different organizations as recipients of the proceeds, though nothing has been made final yet. Siriano, whose husband Brad Walsh designed the “People are people” shirt, has already begun donating all proceeds of the T-shirt to the A.C.L.U. The slogan was born out of frustration, said Siriano, who has made a point of casting different body types for his shows in the past.

“I’ve been doing this for awhile now, and it sometimes can be frustrating that people don't always see it until it’s literally in their face,” he said, explaining that his shirt was geared less toward out-right politics than some of the others from this season. “People keep asking about plus-size on the runway, why you keep dressing all these types of women, and I literally just want people to understand it as just that. ‘People are people.’ Why not? Why does it have to be a topic?”

He continued, “We only did one look because that‘s all you need. It was one powerful, great idea. Obviously there‘s a million things I‘d love to say but this encompassed all of them in one simple phrase.”

The message tee’s presence on fall 2017 runways is a testament to how quickly things can change, and how the fashion industry’s pace puts it in a unique position to react and reflect the sentiment of its consumers. While designers by-and-large have leaned on subtle tools like texture, cut, and color to signal their collection’s point (all-white as a hat tip to suffragettes, for example, or purple as a symbol of cross-party conciliation), outright messaging seems to be the order of the day in the placard and protest era. Against fashion’s more subtle backdrop, a message T-shirt might seem like it’s screaming. But the models were already walking anyhow—might as well talk too.

Video: What Happens at a Donald Trump Protest?

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